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Critique of the American Institution of Education Richard B. Wells © 2013

Chapter 13 The 20th Century Reformers

§ 1. A Century of Conflict

The 19th century had not yet ended when new conflicts over public instructional education began. These conflicts lasted throughout the 20th century with a few breathing spells in between one battle and the next, during which increasingly antagonistic reformer mini-Communities paused to recoup and regroup before renewing their efforts. Equally uncivil conflict continues to this day. If you will permit me a small amount of poetic license, these conflicts were fought out "on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clashed by night1." The 21st century dawned with the institution of public instructional education a ruin of rubble incapable of fulfilling its social contract Duty of functioning as a necessary element in the institution of a justice system for the United States.

I will not keep you in suspense awaiting the detailed critique in the next chapter. You will recall the ratings of the institution at the end of the 19th century depicted in figure 8.24. When the appearances of a general function of public instructional education are merely unintentional events and not a deliberately implemented function of a system of public instructional education, the institution cannot be said to exhibit the function. The rating in every one of the 24 educational functions by the end of the 20th century was: Zero. We have school systems today, but no unitary and systematic institution of public instructional education capable of fulfilling its Duties and carrying out its functions necessitated by the American social contract. In contrast, BaMbuti Pygmy Society has a public education system with no schools, no officially designated teachers, no formal instruction, and a rating of 2 in every one of its 24 educational functions.

I think it is clear America cannot imitate the BaMbuti. Their Society is not our Society and in every Society the institution of education must serve that Society's social contract. Theirs fits their social contract like a tailored glove; ours does not fit at all. The educational aggregate of American school systems is not the whole cause of the stagnation and developing breakdown of the U.S. economy I have been discussing in the previous three chapters. But it is a partial cause. Fixing the institution will not, all by itself, fix the economy. But failing to fix it will mean failing to fix the economy and failing to preserve American Society as a civil Community.

To say "the result of all the time, all the effort, and all the expense that has gone into the education reforms of the 20th century is disappointing" is to say something so understated as to be ludicrous. What might, however, seem surprising to you is the following fact. Every single one of the major reformers and every single one of their opponents was a person who was sincerely convinced that his position was correct, who deeply believed his answers were the right answers, that his antagonists' answers were the wrong answers, and who was genuinely concerned for and striving to better the welfare of his country. Every major participant was right about some things and wrong about others. No one had "the" correct vision or "the" right plan for education reform. There were no heroes. There were no villains. Deontologically, there was no individual who was morally culpable of any crime and no one who did not commit a moral fault. There were only honest and earnest people whose competitions were waged according to the tenets of democracy, in conformity with its antisocial first principle of 'majority rules,' and in disregard of the terms necessitated by an American Republic form of government and its social compact.

Looked at from one perspective, there was no way anyone could have fully succeeded or could have come up with "the" right plan. For any institution of public instructional education to be successful, that institution must be on all points congruent with human nature. Aristotle was correct when, so long ago, he wrote, "No natural property can be altered by habit" [Aristotle (4th 1 Matthew Arnold (1867), Dover Beach.

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Chapter 13: The 20th Century Reformers Richard B. Wells © 2013

century BC) Bk. II.1 2-3 (1103a20)].2 There could have been no objectively valid social-natural science of education or adequately congruent social-natural institution of public instructional education prior to the discovery of mental physics. That did not happen until after the 20th century was over. But what was not possible in the 20th century is possible in the 21st.

The antagonisms of conflict in the 20th century that led to the institution arose from differing, but nonetheless sincerely held, opinions and metaphysical premises. All of these premises shared one thing in common: They were all ontology-centered. No ontology-centered system can ground a social-natural (or any other) science. Every ontology-centered science or belief system is or eventually will be contradicted by actual human experience. Have you been taught somewhere along the line that philosophy and metaphysics do not really matter? Nothing is more false. Alone among all the divers metaphysical systems humankind has concocted over the centuries, there is only one that is epistemology-centered and provides theories and answers that have not failed the tests of science whenever they have been put to the test. That is the Critical system of Kant. In the 20th century conflicts over the institution of public instructional education, no one was a Kantian. No one understood the Critical theory or what it had to say. Very few people do today.

If we are to understand the mistakes of the 20th century, so as not to repeat them, the attitudes and philosophizings of the participants in the divers reforms must be understood. In this chapter, I review who the principal participants were and how they were misguided by unquestioned presuppositions. With that as a basis, chapter 14 then goes on to begin the Critique the reform movements of the 20th century.

§ 2. Philosophy, Philosophers, and Philosophizers

The first thing that needs to be said is this: There were a few philosophers who participated to some degree in the reform attempts, but very few. A much greater number of participants acted as philosophizers or philosophasts but were not philosophers. It is important to know what the difference is between a philosopher and a philosophizer, so I begin with that.

The word "philosophy" comes to us from the Greek φĭλοσοφíα (love of knowledge; pursuit of knowledge) [Liddell & Scott (1996)]. Webster (1962) lists six English usages for the word:

philosophy, n. [ME. and OFr. philosophie; L. philosophia; Gr. philosophia, from philosophos, lover of wisdom.]

1. originally, love of wisdom or knowledge. 2. a study of the processes governing thought and conduct; theory or investigations of the

principles or laws that regulate the universe and underlie all knowledge and reality; included in the study are aesthetics, ethics, logic, metaphysics, etc.

3. the general principles or laws of a field of knowledge, activity, etc.; as, the philosophy of economics.

4. (a) a particular system of principles for the conduct of life; (b) a treatise covering such a system.

5. a study of human morals, character, and behavior. 6. the mental balance believed to result from this; calmness; composure.

2 This is not the most popular translation but I think it is a more accurate one. The most popular translation is, "Nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature." However, it is obvious simply by comparing the Greek text with this translation that the latter heavily paraphrases what Aristotle wrote. Add to this the following consideration: What in the world do you suppose could exist yet not 'exist by nature' (either physical-nature or mental-nature)? Shall we suppose Aristotle was such a sloppy thinker he would have written such a sloppy phrase or conceived of such a meaningless proposition? Would such a sloppy and careless thinker be remembered, respected and studied for his ideas over 24 centuries later?

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How do these usages compare with the way professional philosophers define their field? Mautner's Dictionary of Philosophy acknowledges that "this term is used in a variety of senses," and declines to identify which "sense" – if there is only one – is the one a philosopher means when he uses the word to describe what it is he does professionally. Mautner thus opens the door and allows entry into the club by philosophasters such as Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. Mautner's noncommittal description of what gets called 'philosophy' is not much help to us here. If the only 'philosophy' you have ever read is some work by Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, or any of the trash calling itself "New Age Philosophy" or "New Age Metaphysics," then, my friend, you have never read one word of philosophy3. Just as in ancient Athens, sophists are still with us today.

Blackburn (1996) is more explicit and helpful:

philosophy The study of the most general and abstract features of the world and categories with which we think: mind, matter, reason, proof, truth, etc. In philosophy, the concepts with which we approach the world themselves become the topic of enquiry. A philosophy of a discipline such as history, physics, or law seeks not so much to solve historical, physical, or legal questions as to study the concepts that structure such thinking and to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions. In this sense, philosophy is what happens when a practice becomes self-conscious. The borderline between such 'second-order' reflection and the ways of practicing the first-order discipline itself is not always clear.

Blackburn goes on to note many late-twentieth century philosophers became pessimistic about, and hostile to, the notion that philosophy can actually accomplish any of this. This state of affairs is, in the United States, one of the many intellectually disastrous aftereffects of the wholesale damage done to public education during the 1960s civil war. The same attitude prevalent in Europe is due in part to long-standing damage the practice of philosophy suffered at the hands of the positivism movement of the 19th century and, even more so, to a general psychological dis-illusionment following the carnage of World War I. But the hard fact is: Either philosophers must do the things that Blackburn states above or else their reflections can never be a science and their activities have no just call whatsoever for sharing in the distribution of public funds.

Who is a philosopher? Webster (1962) lists four general usages, one of them obsolete, for this term:

philosopher, n. [ME. philosophre, filosophe; OFr. philosophe; L. philosophus; Gr. philosophos from philos, loving, and sophos, wise.]

1. a person who studies or is learned in philosophy. 2. a person who lives or thinks according to a system of philosophy. 3. a person who meets all events, whether favorable or unfavorable, with calmness and

composure. 4. an alchemist, magician, etc. [Obs.]

The obsolete fourth usage was never anything more than a mislabeling of alchemists, magicians, and so on applied by the uneducated lay public of Europe – and, occasionally, by some of its educated members who were hostile to philosophy in general primarily because of the iron rulership medieval schoolmen had imposed on European education during the Scholasticism period. The latter were taking advantage of the public mislabeling for propaganda purposes.

3 This is probably as good a place as any to mention a committed little band of mystics headquartered in California who call their well organized tommyrot "mental physics." What this cult espouses is not science, much less philosophy. Their so-called "mental physics" is something far different from what I mean when I write about mental physics. I won't mention them again, and wouldn't have mentioned them at all were it not for the unfortunate fact that they happen to call their pseudo-religion "mental physics."

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Usage number 3 is also a public mislabeling and one that is still current today. Its origin is difficult to track down, but it dates back at least as far as the early medieval period4. The label is one that strictly applies only to one particular school of philosophy in ancient Greece, namely the Stoics. The Romans did not hesitate to import ideas, inventions, and technologies from where-ever they found them, and Stoic philosophy was the predominant philosophy of educated upper class Romans. One of the central principles of Stoic philosophy was apathía. The Stoics used the term to mean "freedom from emotion," as opposed to pathos (in Stoic usage, "emotion" or "passion"; the Epicureans used pathos to mean "sensation of pleasure or pain") [Liddell & Scott (1996)]. Roman Eclectics, Cicero for example, also adopted apathía as a principle. Our English word "apathy" descends from this word. However, when a person remains calm and collected in the face of some (usually bad or unpleasant) event to which he is not indifferent, we habitually say he reacts "philosophically" to the event. Only if he is altogether indifferent to what happened or unsympathetic to its effects on people do we say he is "apathetic." When an American shrugs something off with a laconic, "Well, that's life," he is a "philosopher" in this usage of the word. In this treatise, I do not use the word in this connotation, and neither do professional philosophers.

This leaves only the first two usages. Both are technically correct depending on the context in which the word is being used. The technical context for the first usage is one referring to a person in terms of his acquisition of theoretical and historical knowledge of the professional practice of philosophy. Such a person is a philosopher in the strict sense of the word. This is the technical connotation I use for the word in this treatise. If the person puts this knowledge to use then he is a practicing philosopher. If not, then he is a non-practicing philosopher. If his subjective judgment of taste orients or biases him to self-commitment to a particular theory of philosophy – still granting that he is not unlearned in other competing theories – then he is usually given a "school" label such as Platonic philosopher, Aristotelian philosopher, neo-Kantian philosopher, Kantian philosopher, etc. For your purposes of reference, your present author is a Kantian philosopher. If a philosopher is knowledgeable about only the theory of one particular school and is unlearned in the principles and theories of other schools of philosophy, then he is an overspecialized philosopher and whatever opinions he might hold of the other schools and philosophical systems has no more objectively valid weight than the opinion of any layperson uneducated in philosophy. Most college professors of philosophy are not overspecialized and many ally themselves, for reasons they judge to be adequate, to one particular school because they think its principles and theories are more correct than those of the others. It is not unusual to find "schools of one person" among professional philosophers because, while the individual largely agrees with some broad and fundamental principles of, say, the Later Wittgenstein school, he also disagrees with some part of its doctrine and has developed an alternative one of his own that others in his "main" school have not accepted. This has been going on since before the days of Socrates. One also finds it, albeit in hypothetical rather than doctrinal form, in the empirical sciences.

The correct technical context for the second usage is one that pertains to the behavior of a person. There is, however, a subtlety in the dictionary definition of this usage originating in its use of the word "philosophy." "Philosophy" in what context? Here Blackburn's distinction of 'first order' and 'second order' reflections is key. Usage number 2 is applied on both sides of what Blackburn called the hazy "borderline" between philosophy in the strict sense (the study of the most general and abstract features of the world and categories with which we think: mind, matter, reason, proof, truth, etc.) and the maxims of thinking and practice employed in the practice of a specific discipline. A theologian who self-consciously applies the doctrine of his theology to his religious inquiries and conclusion behaves like a philosopher but he is not a strict-sense philosopher. He is, and is rightly called, a theologian but his behavior is indistinguishable from

4 We find it in the Scholastics' legacy of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, a work he wrote in prison waiting for Rome's Goth king, Theodoric, to have him put to death (which Theodoric did in 524 AD).

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the practices of a strict-sense philosopher. He is, therefore, a philosophizer within the scope of his theology. The necessary and sufficient mark of his behavior is that he is knowledgeable in and applies some systematic doctrine based on axiomatic or acroamatic principles.

What distinguishes a strict-sense or scientific philosopher from a second-order philosopher is whether: (1) he makes a systematic doctrine of metaphysics the basis of a study of "the principles or laws that regulate the universe and underlie all knowledge and reality" vs. (2) he begins from an existing metaphysic and applies it axiomatically to a special discipline. A theologian is a philosophizer (a person practicing in a philosophical manner) who begins with a first premise of some divine supernatural power – e.g., God or some pantheon of gods in polytheistic religions. Some outstanding examples of philosophical theology in Western civilization are provided by books X-XIII of Augustine's Confessions, Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica, and Calvin's Christianae religionis institutio. Specific transcendent ideas for most religious theologies often come from religious texts or oral traditions that are partly historical, partly mythological, and always mystic. Examples include the divers Christian Bibles, the Jewish Torah, the Islamic Koran, the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, the Hellenic Greeks' Βιβλιοθηκη, the writings of Mencius, the Analects of Confucius, and Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ch'ing. For the few physical-natural scientists who undertake second-order philosophizing, the typical ground is a collection of pseudo-metaphysical prejudices called "scientific materialism."

No official technical lexicon of philosophy contains terms for drawing a clear distinction between strict-sense philosophy and philosophizing. This can be accounted a defect of lexicon. Because no terminological convention currently exists, in this treatise I take the philological liberty of employing the four terms – strict-sense philosophy and strict-sense philosopher on the one hand, and second-order philosophy and second-order philosopher on the other – in the manners just described. When I use the terms "philosophy" and "philosopher" without an adjective qualifier in front, you should assume I mean "philosophy" or "philosopher" as defined in the glossary because the general context of this treatise is the context of natural science. Outside of this chapter, you can also safely assume the acroamatic basis I use is Kant's Critical metaphysics. In this chapter I find it necessary to discuss matters in a broader context.

The ambiguity in the lexicon just noted reverberates into a like ambiguity in usages of the terms "philosophize" and "philosophizer." Webster (1962) provides the following usages:

philosophize, v.i., to deal philosophically with abstract matter; to think or reason like a philosopher; to search into the reason and nature of; to investigate phenomena and assign rational causes for their existence.

philosophizer, n., one who philosophizes.

I trust the ambiguity in these terms is clear to you after the discussion above. Philosophize is a verb and so it pertains to how a person behaves, not to the Objects of this behavior – "thinking or reasoning"; "searching into the reason and nature of"; "investigating"; "assigning rational causes." The term philosophizer, therefore, refers to one who philosophizes, whether this activity is either of the two types of philosophy or is some other type of philosophizing reflection, e.g. theology.

Here, then, is the key point I wish to convey. When earlier I said that there were many philosophizers participating in the educational reforms of the 20th century but few philosophers, what I meant was that a few behaved as philosophers in the strict or the applied sense and the majority did not. This means the majority of participants, regardless of whether they assumed their reasoning was based upon some sound strict-sense philosophy or not, were actually operating non-strict-sense and, in many cases, were acting on such an uninquisitive level of presupposition that what they were doing cannot properly be called philosophical at all outside of the context of the third dictionary definition of "philosopher" provided above. Most thought that

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their rationalizing and theorizing carried the authority of some established strict-sense system of philosophy. In point of fact, most had the support of nothing of the kind. There was little effort put into explicitly establishing the linkage between the point of application of their efforts and whatever ground or basis in philosophy they might have thought they were using.

This is not an unusual behavior in human events. Indeed, quite often physical-natural scientists are guilty of doing the same thing. The Critical ground for this is the same as is found in the great majority of human behaviors – namely, the satisficing character of human decision-making. All human beings are satisficing decision-makers. The only question of distinction is the degree to which the individual has built into his manifold of rules and manifold of concepts practical and conceptual maxims that make it harder for him to satisfy himself. A great deal of the training mathematicians, physical-natural scientists and engineers receive as students is aimed specifically at producing educational Self-development actions that result in the learner self-constructing these sorts of maxim. This is accomplished by an on-going series of assignments in which the learner initially experiences failure events5 in homework assignments, laboratory exercises, and written examinations. An attempt is made to meter out the dosage of failure-experiences at a level high enough to provoke initiation of maxim-building but not so high as to provoke frustration and rupture of the learning process. In the trade, we call it "building problem-solving skills." The U.S. Marine Corps has their own version of this they use in basic training at Parris Island.

People in special disciplines outside of engineering, physical-natural science or mathematics often experience sometimes-pronounced levels of frustration when they have professional inter-actions with engineers, physical-natural scientists or mathematicians. The cause is a very simple one to grasp once you understand the principles of mental physics. The latter people simply are not satisfied by the same contextual scope of satisfaction-producing judgmentation that satisfies the former. This is not because of any innate human difference but is simply the consequence that the latter have been trained and habituated to respond with maxims of judgmentation that require more to achieve satisfaction than what is required by the maxims of judgmentation other people have self-developed. The training of engineers, physical-natural scientists, and mathematicians is designed to produce critical reasoners who are "harder to satisfy," and this result is intentional. Trust me: an engineer can find it just as frustrating to interact with a poet as a poet can find interacting with him.

There is a broader lesson to be learned here as well. Have you already spotted it? A poet is likely to belong to a mini-Community of poets, and an engineer is likely to belong to a mini-Community of engineers. It is not unusual for the poet and the engineer to not overlap into each other's mini-Communities to an extent involving mini-Community-specific mores and folkways – and maxims of mores and folkways are key ingredients in satisficing judgmentation. When there is not a significant overlap, the poet's maxims of mini-Community-specific mores and folkways and those of the engineer are contextually granulated. This is another way of saying, in terms of the Weaver's model of two-person interaction (figure 13.1) [Wells (2011a), (2012b) chap. 2], the poet and the engineer react with individual meaning implication sets that have little or nothing in common. This is always a potential ground for conflict between members of different mini-Communities because the interacting individuals respond with different Semantic sets to the same objective situation. This means they are going to misunderstand each other and misinterpret each other's meanings. Conflict is very likely to arise when they do. Such conflicts were legion during the educational reforms of the 20th century.

A great many of these conflicts took place over competing paradigms of education. These paradigms are usually called "educational philosophies" by educators, although in the strict sense they are nothing of the sort. And that brings us to the next topic. 5 Put less pompously, the student "gets the wrong answer" and the teacher sees to it he is informed of this.

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Figure 13.1: Weaver's model of two-person interaction.

§ 3. Conflict Over Education Institution in the 20th Century

When I read different scholarly accounts pertaining to the history of 20th century American institution of PIE (public instructional education), I find they can be put, broadly and loosely, into two major classes. Each can be regarded as constituting a genus, within which is found numerous species. In addition, there is a third topical category of education history, not properly regarded as a third genus because each genus already mentioned is represented within it by divers authors. This topical category is confined to histories specific to secondary or higher education only, an important part of the general history of public instructional education in America but still only a topical subset. I regard Angus & Mirel (1999), Veysey (1965) and Thelin (2004) as three of the better scholarly representatives. I use these sources as representatives of the field of the history of American secondary and higher education in this treatise.

The broader historical treatments of the American institution of public instructional education more fully cover its entire span from public schooling to college and university schooling. The first genus uses an object-oriented perspective written in terms of more or less specific institutes of schooling, curricula, and aims of educators. Often it includes some attempt to outline what are almost invariably called "educational philosophies." Two of what I regard as the better scholarly treatments belonging to this genus are Potter (1967) and Pulliam & Patten (2007). Treatises of this genus tend to provide observations concerning corporate behaviors of reform movements.

The other genus consists of scholarly treatments that focus and write in terms of individuals who played key roles in the raucous conflicts of 20th century education reforms. Two of what I regard as the better scholarly treatments in this genus are Reese (2011) and Ravitch (2000). I use these two references as representatives of the second genus. Causes of social phenomena, in every case, are always individual human beings acting either individually or as members in the body of some corporate person. For this reason, accounts that adopt the perspective of the second genus tend to provide more data bringing us closer to the sort of fundamental evidence required to treat the topic in the manner of a social-natural science.

This does not mean treatments belonging to the first genus are without importance. If that were so, I wouldn't bring them up at all in this treatise. What the first genus provides, that the second usually doesn't quite reach, is a more concrete exposition of specifics of the paradigms

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that are given allegiance by divers mini-Communities possessing sufficient corporate persuasive Personfähigkeit to act as non-negligible partial causes determining the outcomes of events. No one single individual has ever been, all by himself, the decisive human factor in setting a course of reform or in the establishment of a particular institution. All reform movements in the history of the American institution of PIE have been collective efforts of corporate mini-Communities whose union is based on a shared set of core ideas, beliefs, and a high degree of commonality in individual judgments of taste by its membership. For any particular program of reform to succeed in becoming an institutional establishment, it must recruit enough public approval or, at least, avoid enough public censure that it receives the tangible support from the public store of tangible goods (mainly money, land, and facilities) its program requires.

This does not mean particular individuals are not in a sense "deified" by members of the mini-Community their ideas and actions played a pivotal role in founding. All mini-Communities have to coalesce around something in order to form in the first place, and those individuals who exhibited sufficient persuasive power of their persons to attract and enlist supporters are usually dubbed, sometimes more and sometimes less correctly, the "leaders of the movement." When a movement encounters conflicts with other mini-Communities, and these conflicts turn uncivic and mean-spirited (as all the major reform movements of the 20th century did), it is a typical mini-Community behavior for the membership to deify its founders in a manner not dissimilar to habits the Roman Senate displayed in declaring emperors and important generals to be "gods" or the Roman Catholic Church displays when it declares a person who is important in the history of the church to be a saint. It really makes little actual difference if we label John Dewey "the divine Dewey" or "St. Dewey" versus merely coining a label – Deweyism – to commemorate his role. It is all just a matter of labeling. It serves preservation of Order in the corporate persuasive Personfähigkeit of the mini-Community and often hands the mini-Community's opponents a convenient straw man to attack through propaganda.

When they do, it is overwhelmingly typical that the attacked mini-Community responds to criticism with outrage and what could almost be called holy zeal. The mini-Community almost always launches counterattacks in retaliation. Differences of opinion quickly become moral crusades, discussion and debate gives way to mean-spirited propaganda campaigning, and the original differences of opinion disappear under a wave of vindictiveness that establishes social-chemical antibonding relationships and sets them firmly in place between mini-Communities. Chances for any sort of national consensus diminish, and service to the whole of the public is discarded. The principal victims are real pupils and students whose future welfare is of honest concern to all the divers mini-Communities. If the biblical story of Solomon and the two women who claimed the same child went like the 20th century reform conflicts, Solomon would have cut the child in half immediately and handed each woman one piece without bothering to discuss it.

Whatever mini-Community temporarily gains the political upper hand assumes despotic ruler-ship, shredding the social compact of the Society. The institution itself becomes an enormity perpetrated on the Society, provoking unintended educational Self-development acts by the public. Striving to achieve common social objectives gives way to striving to achieve or maintain special interest objectives of the mini-Communities engaged in conflict.

Precisely this is what happened in the 20th century. Every mini-Community participating in reform effort eventually resorted to the most vicious and deceptive propaganda campaigning to malign not the objections of its critics but its critics themselves. The entire history of reforms in the 20th century is as disgraceful an exhibition of pettiness and corporate self-love as could be imagined by a calm and dispassionate observer. And all of this was perpetrated by people who as individuals had only the best of intentions and the most noble of motives. This last fact is probably the best single illustration of what failure to provide adequate education functions in the social division of PIE has cost the United States. If St. Bernard never actually said the quote folk-

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lore attributes to him – "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" – he should have. It would have been the most profound metaphorical truth he ever uttered.

As the reform conflicts dragged on: propaganda vitriol rose; divers mini-Communities became increasingly corporate-egocentric; each became increasingly antisocial in its behaviors; the leaders gradually turned themselves into rulers; and these rulers adopted Taylorite principles of management and administration. This proved destructive to the mini-Communities from within. Individual teachers began to splinter off into divers groups of Toynbee proletarians who no longer followed NEA authority figures; business managers and parents parted over what the objectives for educating the children should be; Parent-Teacher Associations lost participation and influence and some broke down completely; politicians played groups off against each other (an historically common divide-and-rule tactic). By the 1960s internal granulation within the various reformers' mini-Communities had fatally weakened their unions. The civil war of the 1960s finished them off. Today none of the mini-Communities who held the stage in the first half of the 20th century are effective corporate forces any longer. This does not mean all the old attitudes, paradigms, and prejudices have vanished. It merely means that pockets of partisans were left in the rubble of the former mini-Communities. The old attitudes, prejudices and hatreds formed in the 20th century are still around, posing a brooding threat to new attempts to reform public instructional education and even to civil debate over its future. There is today no "educational establishment" (to use a label that came into vogue in the '60s). We are in a period of institutional interregnum, and whether America will ever emerge from it is an open question. To explore it, we must examine those attitudes and persuasions of the old combatants that still persist among their partisan remnants and heirs.

§ 4. The Confusion Over "Educational Philosophy"

§ 4.1 Habits of Speech

At least among academics, no discussion concerning educational practices goes on for very long before a topic widely called "educational philosophy" is raised. Typically the learned folks who engage in such a discussion calmly employ terms with meanings they do not define, and the other folks calmly accept the names used for these terms as if they perfectly well understand what person using them means. My observations (and participations) lead me to conclude that in most cases what the one person means and what the other person understands are two entirely different things altogether, and neither person seems to be aware that the conversation has bifurcated and they are not at all talking about the same subject matter or using the same context. Both, however, are eager to get through the discussion and reach a conclusion, make a decision, formulate a plan, establish a policy, or otherwise accomplish whatever agenda has brought them together for the occasion. These sorts of discussions are splendid examples of adult egocentrism – a term that means the presupposition by one adult that what he holds his words and concepts to mean are the same as what other people hold them to mean6. The usage of words and phrases can become – and does become – habitual without the least necessity for common words and phrases to have common meaning implications.

Habits produce a sort of behavioral automatism that returns a great many useful and important

6 This technical term derives from developmental psychology studies conducted by Piaget, et al. during the 20th century. It should not be confused with an homonymous term, "egocentrism," used to convey a con-notation of self-absorption and self-centering. All human beings are at all times "Self-centered"; after all, if you are not "with yourself" where else could you be? The developmental process known as "socialization" is an educational Self-development process during which children move away from childish egocentrism to achieve an understanding that others have different concepts and opinions.

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practical advantages. William James called habit "the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent" [James (1890), vol. I, pg. 121]. He went on to say, "The more the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper works" [ibid., pg. 122]. An habitual action is the expression of a previously constructed sensorimotor or ratio-expression scheme that in one's past experiences has produced results judged to be satisfactory (that is, which satisfy the impatient demands of the process of pure practical Reason). Action schemes are made habitual by the individual because they prove to be expedient (zweckmäßig) for purposes of pure practical Reason. Thus the individual self-develops practical heuristics for responding to and dealing with broad classes of circumstances. He constantly expands the scope of application for his habitual schemes until an outcome gainsays the presumption of Zweckmäßigkeit, an occurrence that always produces a disturbance of equilibrium necessitating alterations of maxims. From the viewpoint of mental physics, automatism is what the phrase "being set in one's ways" denotes.

Although habit-expression most often produces satisfaction, it does not necessarily produce it. James was a bit over-optimistic in saying "the powers of mind will be set free." When an habitual action produces a result that frustrates any purpose of impatient Reason, the next most common action expression is one involving type-α compensation behavior (ignórance). One aspect of this type of compensation involves behaviors that (impatiently) seek to abolish the disturbance by removing an object judged by the behaving individual to be the cause of his disturbance. If this object happens to be another person, removing the object can and often does involve such things as heated argument or, less often but still too frequently to ignore, ostracism or violence.

In some cases and in some mini-Societies, individuals can even share habituated rituals of this sort. For example, when I was a little boy the mini-Community of little boys of my same age in my hometown had a ritual for resolving disputes that ran quite rigidly through five stages in an inflexible order: posturing, name-calling, shoving, fist-fighting, reconciliation. Unless something intervened to rupture the cycle, this ritual was carried out with what can only be called the force of a moral custom. An apt name for it would have been "the Code of the Little Boys." Boys who transgressed this code were ostracized by the other little boys, with divers classes that depended on the manner of violation: sissy; coward; dirty fighter; bully; tattletale (our equivalent of a "rat" in mafia Society); or hood (our word for "hoodlum"). The ritual details and the Code were, in retrospect, really quite complicated. But anyone who wanted to remain a citizen of 'the Mini-Community of Little Boys' had to learn and obey it7.

Adults are, of course, much more suave and sophisticated than little boys. Nonetheless, they often exhibit more or less ritualized habits of coping with disturbances. In The Idea of the Social Contract I called this the phenomenon of re-staging in rule judgmentation. The phenomenon is an empirical reflection of individual and Community-shared value systems [Wells (2012a), chap. 5 §4]. The conflicts over education institution in the 20th century involved such habituated rituals of expression and interaction. Provocation of re-staging and ritual was promoted in no small part by ill-defined terminology and adult egocentrism.

§ 4.2 The Source of Misunderstandings Over "Educational Philosophy"

It is fairly common in colleges of education for students preparing to be teachers or school administrators to receive content instruction in the history of philosophy and in "philosophies of education." I much applaud the intent behind this but not the way in which the teaching of these topics is practiced. What the students learn from it does not fare well under Critical critique. By and large, very little of what is learned can be called philosophy, either basic or applied. 7 I have noted with great interest and no small amount of amusement that the social Code of the BaMbuti Pygmies greatly resembles our "Code of the Little Boys" in many ways.

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This is certainly not the fault of the students. It is not even the fault of the college faculty when one considers that faculty members were once students themselves, and that what they dutifully pass on to their students is what they themselves were taught. Having learned their lessons from those who are represented to students as experts and authorities in the field – which under our system they are; the expertise is not in question, but what the expertise covers is – it is not in the least mysterious that as professors they would have faith in the matters they present. The constitution of this matter is very well exemplified in chapter 2 of Pulliam & Patten (2007). I'll get to that a few pages below.

How does it come to pass that what gets called educational philosophy (or philosophy of education) in colleges of education contains very little actual philosophy? This can be traced to institutionalized practices of long standing carried on in departments of philosophy. The faculty in these departments can no more be blamed for the tradition they carry on than can the faculties of colleges of education for their traditions, and for the same reason. When a student undertakes to master a discipline, it is an entirely normal presupposition that what he is being presented with truly defines that discipline. When it does not, undesired consequences follow. If the student himself questions the premises of his discipline, he is not long allowed to remain a student of that discipline. Professors judge "what students get right and get wrong," so students appease them.

Of the legionary systematic doctrines of philosophy put forward over time, all except one or perhaps two8 have been ontology-centered. The known exception is Kant's Critical Philosophy, which is the only epistemology-centered systematic doctrine extant. The word "epistemology" had not yet been coined during Kant's lifetime; he used the word Kritik (Critique) to mean what we today call an epistemological analysis. Kant tells us explicitly in the introduction to the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason that this is what he is doing. He tells us that his system is no less than a Copernican-like re-centering of metaphysics. Philosophers today call this "Kant's Copernican revolution" in philosophy yet not too many modern philosophers explicitly understand that the Critical Philosophy is epistemology-centered. Therefore they interpret it using ontology-centered suppositions. This is a grievous error but, in fairness to them, Kant was a notoriously opaque writer. British philosopher C.E.M. Joad wrote,

[Kant's] exposition is exceedingly obscure. His method of writing is abstract and diffuse, and his meaning itself changes in a bewildering way. . . . Nevertheless, such is the obscurity of Kant's writing that the reader can never feel quite sure that it is different. It always remains a possibility for the reader to reckon with that he has simply failed to understand what Kant is saying. [Joad (1936), pg. 359]

I think it is highly likely that anyone who has ever wrestled with Kant's writings will agree with Joad wholeheartedly on this point. Kant's immediate successors – Fichte, Herbart, Schelling, and Hegel – completely missed the significance of Kant's Copernican Revolution and immediately reverted to ontology-centered metaphysics even while thinking they were following up on and adding to the further development of Kant's philosophy. It was they, and not Kant, who founded what came to be known in the history of philosophy as "German Idealism."

All ontology-centered systems of metaphysics are eventually forced to call upon the agency of some deity to rescue them. It doesn't matter whether this deity is some traditional rendering of a god or if it is a mathematical deity such as a "god of probability." I would like you to consider this: If you think such a thing as "random chance" or "luck" can be made to stand as a cause of

8 The second one is the philosophy of the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras. It was he who reportedly wrote, "Man is the measure of all things." Unfortunately, almost nothing is known of the details of what Protagoras propounded. Only fragments of this have come down to us through the ages. We do not know what Protagoras' philosophy actually was [Zeller (1931), pp. 75-83].

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some event, then you are reifying the transcendent notion of "random chance" or "luck" – and this is what I mean when I refer to "a god of probability." But in mundo non datur casus – "chance is not given in the sensible world" – and in mundo non datur fatum – "fate is not given in the sensible world." The resort ontology-centered metaphysics must eventually have to calling in the agency of a deity means that no ontology-centered system of metaphysics can ever serve to ground a natural science. Eventually that science will encounter irresolvable paradoxes and its doctrine will break down. This is the root of scientific revolutions, in which the premises of a science are irrevocably changed. Feynman wrote,

[The] philosophy or ideas around a theory may change enormously when there are very tiny changes in the theory. . . . In order to get something that would produce a slightly different result [the philosophy or ideas around a theory] had to be completely different. In stating a new law you cannot make imperfections on a perfect thing; you have to have another perfect thing. [Feynman (1965), pp. 168-9]

When experience gainsays a natural science at its foundations, it gainsays the metaphysical foundations of that science as well. By early in the 19th century, scientists had come to recognize that all the systems of philosophy they knew about – including the forms that had been produced by the German Idealists and mistaken for Kant – eventually led beyond the horizon of possible experience and ended up calling upon the agency of God to save them9. No one had made that clearer than Hegel. It was, in fact, about the only thing in Hegel's philosophy that was clear. They also understood quite clearly that no metaphysic resting on the Dasein of a deity could ever serve as a ground for the premises of a natural science. Natural science is concerned solely with the natural world – that is, the world of possible sensuous experience – while religion is concerned with and premised upon the Dasein of a supernatural world – that is, a "world beyond or above the natural world," which is what the "super" in "supernatural" denotes. Natural science has absolutely nothing to say and nothing it should say about supernature. Theology and religion can say nothing about science without invoking the agency of miracles, but the methodology of science can never employ miraculous explanations and remain objectively valid10.

As a consequence, philosophy – long regarded as the "first science" and the foundation of all the special sciences – was ignominiously drummed out of the academy of science. Philosophers were ridiculed as sophists and pretenders of knowledge. A movement called "positivism" took hold as the dominant attitude held by natural scientists. Philosophers never recovered from the psychological trauma of this episode and to this day have not attempted to restore the place of philosophy as the "first science" and founder of all the special sciences. In one way, perhaps this is just as well; with all of philosophy once more ontology-centered, there was nothing fruitful it could have produced anyway. In another way it was unfortunate because, there being no scientific motivation to recover Kant's system from the neo-Kantian mists that had obscured it, the fecund development of social-natural science was delayed by two centuries and is only now beginning. The meek abandonment of the only publicly beneficial role professional philosophy has to offer led to some strong criticism. Bloom was one of its harshest critics. He wrote,

Most interesting of all, lost amidst this collection of disciplines, modestly sits philosophy. 9 Kant died in 1804. At the time of which I speak here, no one known to the public understood his theory. 10 Teachers especially should be made aware that the highly publicized "big bang theory" of the origin of the universe that is now being taught in science classes as a scientific fact is nothing of the kind. The theory is based on the premise of something called a "vacuum fluctuation" – an artifact wedged into mathematical probability theory in physics. Well, a "vacuum fluctuation" is nothing else than a miracle requiring a god of probability to perform it. The "big bang" is not a fact; it is an hypothesis explained on the basis of a premise utterly lacking real objective validity. We do not know whether or not a "big bang" ever happened, and we never will. The propaganda that has been spread saying the big bang is a fact is entirely deceitful.

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It has been dethroned by political and theoretical democracy, bereft of the passion or the capacity to rule. Its story defines in itself our whole problem. Philosophy once proudly proclaimed that it was the best way of life, and it dared to survey the whole, to seek the first causes of all things, and not only dictated its rules to the special sciences but constituted and ordered them. The classic philosophic books are philosophy in action, doing precisely these things. But this was all impossible, hybris, say their impoverished heirs. . . . Now they are just books on a shelf. Democracy took away philosophy's privileges, and philosophy could not decide whether to fade away or take a job. Philosophy was architectonic, had the plans for the whole building, and the carpenters, masons and plumbers were its subordinates and had no meaning without its plan. . . . We live off its legacy. . . . Philosophy is no longer a way of life and it is no longer a sovereign science. . . . An American high school student knows only the word "philosophy," and it does not appear to be any more serious a life choice than yoga. [Bloom (1987), pg. 377]

Such was the precarious and effete situation of philosophy at the end of the 19th and through-out the 20th centuries. Of all the major reformers of education in the 20th century, there were only three philosophers who brought to the fray formal philosophies, and these were applied philosophies premised upon ontology-centered (and therefore objectively non-valid) premises11. The first was John Dewey. The second was Boyd H. Bode. It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of their theories in the fracas of the 20th century reform battles. The third was Theodore Brameld, a minor but somewhat notorious philosopher.

I will say straight up that Dewey's and Bode's applied philosophies managed to find a great many correct things insofar as the congruence of the theorems with human Nature is concerned. It would be a serious error indeed to discard all of Dewey's and Bode's philosophies merely because they did not get everything right. If we applied such a standard to science, there would be no sciences that survived it. The errors in these applied philosophies come straight out of ontology-centered suppositions and these, of course, must be abandoned and objectively valid principles put in their place. This is to say the Dewey-Bode applied philosophy needs a Critical overhaul to make it work correctly and bring it into full congruence with the mental physics of human Nature. When a physical-natural science doesn't work quite right, its practitioners seek out the empirical errors that have been inadvertently introduced into it and fix them. It can be nowise different for the scientific practice of applied philosophy.

You might by now be asking, "What the deuce does he mean by 'applied philosophy'?" The term derives from an architectonic structure Kant deduced for a scientifically correct organization of philosophical research. "Applied philosophy" is in no way an oxymoron. Pure philosophy pertains to the discovery of the fundamental acroams of epistemology and human mental Nature. Empirical science is scientific method applied to a special topic. It has particular restrictions and boundaries it imposes on its topic, and all fecundity of a natural science depends on this. But the fundamental acroams of human mental Nature are wholly general, and to use them in a science it is necessary to build a bridge between Critical philosophy proper and the special science. That is what an applied philosophy is made to do. It is a Critical restriction of theorems to fit the purpose of a special science. Its details are called an applied metaphysic. This is a topic I have covered in detail in a previous paper [Wells (2011b)].

There are two phases in the derivation of an applied metaphysic and its application in applied philosophy. The first is the deduction of the Critically proper Object of the applied philosophy and its empirical science. That step has been carried out for a science of education in the first volume of this trilogy. The second step is the deduction of Critical axioms and theorems that pertain to this Object and are to be used in the practice of the special science. That is a task for the third volume of this trilogy. In that volume, Dewey-Bode theory has an important part to play. 11 The neo-Kantian philosophy and pseudo-psychology of Herbart was rejected early on.

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It might seem surprising to you that I introduce the notion of an "axiom" into the exposition. In one context, an axiom is what the Greek philosophers held it to be, namely a "truth of nature." What it is not, however, is a "self-evident truth" because all Critical axioms are deduced, not posited, from the acroams of Critical metaphysics proper. They are, in other words, "truths of human mental Nature" understood in the context of the Object of a special science. Deduction of an axiom is part of the rational – that is, "mathematical" – side of scientific philosophy. You might find it interesting to learn that our word "mathematics" derives from the Greek word µάθηµα (mathema) – "that which is learned; lesson" [Liddell & Scott (1996)]. Anything used to learn something about Objects is mathematics. There is much more to mathematics than just arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus.

Dewey, Bode, and Brameld were the only philosophers immediately involved as philosophers in the American reform movements, although there was no shortage of philosophizers espousing attitudes oriented towards one or another vision of education. These philosophizers, as well as a few philosophasters who added to the general noise level, were sometimes quick to lay flimsy claims that their interpretations (or, not infrequently, misinterpretations) were supported by major philosophical schools of thought. Pulliam & Patten (2007) present a table12 in their book listing names held to be people who were "influences on educational philosophy." A reader of their book makes a grave error if he assumes all these influential people were philosophers or, for those who were, that they contributed to the philosophies of the reform. It is one thing for a philosophizer to be "influenced by" what he has read or been taught about someone else's philosophy. It is another thing altogether to say his philosophizing made any useful contributions. It is still another thing to say that when a philosopher philosophizes he is engaged in the practice of philosophy per se.

Chapter 2 of Pulliam & Patten (2007) provides a good example of what professors in colleges of education took away from their own exposures to philosophy and pass on to their students in regard to 'educational philosophies.' Metaphorically, this exposure is a swift bus tour featuring a heavily summarized history of philosophy, piecemeal readings selected from major works of philosophy, and a bit of coloring given to interpretation of these philosophies by the instructors. This is what passes as the students' education in philosophy. It is not at all adequate to pass for even a minimal study of philosophy, especially for students who are not majoring in that subject.

What often takes place in the philosophy classroom is this. The students are assigned to read selections of what a particular philosopher has written from some reading list. The selection is not at all enough to adequately cover the philosophical theory to which the student is being exposed. Nor is the time allowed to the students adequate for them to reflect and pursue deeper inquiry into what they have read and been assigned to comment upon. One might as well teach physics out of The Cartoon Guide to Physics13. The Latin maxim ex pede Herculem14 simply doesn't work in the case of philosophy.

The reading is followed in the next class period by a more or less freeform discussion of what the individual students took from their reading. Not uncommonly, this turns into something of a point-counterpoint discussion among the students during which the instructor interjects only if someone makes an egregious misinterpretation. Usually no summarizing of points or drawing of a conclusion follows, so the discussion amounts to nothing more than a bandying back and forth of

12 Table 2.1, pg. 36 of Pulliam & Patten (2007). The table is described as "developed by Timothy J. Bergen, Jr., University of South Carolina, and modified by the authors." No specific publication by Bergen was referenced. Bergen is a faculty member in USC's college of education, and I have not been able so far to contact him in order to learn what parts of this table he claims as his own work and what parts were changed or added by Pulliam and Van Patten, both of whom are educators rather than philosophers. 13 by Larry Gonick and Art Huffman (1990), NY: HarperCollins Publishers. 14 "(know) Hercules from his foot." It means "draw an inference of the whole from an insignificant part."

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learners' opinions. The students turn in brief essays detailing what they learned from their reading, and it's on to the next stop on the bus tour. This is not studying philosophy; it is merely being exposed to the existence of something called philosophy. At the least the students ought to be warned what they are not being taught. This state of affairs has been going on since before the mid- to late-1960s15 and, at least according to Joad, well before then:

It is usual to introduce a book on philosophy intended for the general reader with some account of the subject matter of philosophy, the nature of its results and the methods which it pursues. The reader is told that he will not be made free of any definite and agreed body of knowledge; he is warned that philosophers frequently do not even discuss the same questions and that, when they do, it is only to give diametrically opposed answers; and he is informed that he will be asked to take part not in a steady and ordered advance from speculation to knowledge but in a series of marches and counter-marches, in the course of which he will traverse and retraverse the same territory in the company of travelers whose concern seems less to arrive at a goal than to obliterate the footsteps of their predecessors. It is conceivable that, if the book is of the lighter sort, he may be regaled at this point with a gibe about blind men searching in dark rooms for nonexistent black cats. [Joad (1936), pg. 9]

If that is what philosophy is, one is inclined to ask why anyone would study it at all. The majority of physical-natural scientists do not. I have long considered it more than a little odd that a person can receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree in America without the need of ever having taken one single course in philosophy or ever having read one single book on the subject.

Joad was what in this country is often called "a character" and it has been suggested by some that he was more radio celebrity than philosopher. (The man had a lot of enemies). Be that as it may, what Patrick wrote as the opening line in his book is consistent with what Joad wrote:

This book is intended as an introductory text in philosophy for college and university students, and as a guide book for the general reader who would like to find his way into this interesting field of inquiry. It sets forth no system of philosophy – at least I hope not. The purpose of philosophy is to impel to thought, not to satisfy inquiry with a "system." [Patrick (1924), pg. v]

Hogwash. When this is the sort of "instruction" provided it is no marvel either that educators come to hold the views they hold on "educational philosophy" or other Americans equate it with hot air. The study of philosophy is important, but not for "impelling to thought." If it doesn't help people find real answers to real questions and real solutions to real problems, it is of no use at all and might as well be, to use Hume's famous quote, "committed to the flames." There is valuable utility in studying and analyzing even the failed major philosophical systems of the past. If you know the mistakes great thinkers of yesteryear made, and how they came to make them, then you enjoy a better likelihood of not making the same mistakes yourself. As Santayana very correctly wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

What, then, have most educators mainly taken away from the exposure to philosophy they have received in school? I think chapter 2 of Pulliam & Patten (2007) is an excellent example to use in illustrating this. Within the caveat I have presented above, the two authors actually do a

15 Things are a little better for students majoring in philosophy. They, at least, are exposed to more and might even be provided with a little depth in one or two philosophies. Plato and Descartes seem to be popular choices. However, a real professional study of philosophy, or at any rate one philosophy, usually does not begin before graduate school. In this way the ranks of philosophy professors are replenished. For everyone else, any education they receive in philosophy is likely to be entirely the outcome of independent educational self-development activity they undertake on their own later.

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very fine job of presenting and summarizing what educators have come to hold as the landscape of "educational philosophies." Furthermore, what the two authors write is correct in the particular details; they make no misstatements other than the overriding misstatements that what they are describing are all philosophies and the dramatis personae they name are all philosophers rather than merely people who were philosophizing – and those misstatements are direct consequences of the education problem presented above.

§ 4.3 Descriptions of "Educational Philosophy"

After analyzing the content in chapter 2 of Pulliam & Patten (2007), I conclude that their list of items discussed is comprised of five elements:

1. metaphysical hypotheses; 2. movements; 3. labelings; 4. a philosophy (pragmatism and its divisions) and a taxonomy of philosophizing

perspectives (an ad hoc modification of Brameld's taxonomy); 5. a potpourri of orientations of attitudes.

A metaphysical hypothesis is a speculative idea made in connection with cognitions of actual experience as an explanatory ground. It sets out a premise concerning what might be called "the nature of Nature." It does so within some limited scope of context and from some Standpoint or reflective perspective pertaining to how that scope is being judged. The premise is made to be a condition for drawing conclusions of lower inferences. All people, whether cognizant of it or not, whether scientifically or merely by default of habit, make basic metaphysical hypotheses and use them every day in every act of comprehension. Each of us self-constructs, from infancy on, his own peculiar and private metaphysic because any metaphysic is no more and no less than "the way one looks at the world." The difference between the great philosophies in history and the peculiar personal metaphysics all people develop is this: in a system of philosophy, metaphysical hypotheses are deliberately and carefully introduced as a part (and only a part) of a systematic doctrine; in contrast, the metaphysical hypotheses constructed and used by the overwhelming majority of people are constructed piecemeal by accidents of experience. I call those hypotheses metaphysical prejudices because they are grounded in merely subjective judgments of taste.

We all make them. By far the ones most commonly found are naïve realism and ontological presupposition. All human beings begin life as uncritical naïve realists and assume an ontology-centered perspective for understanding experience. These judicial metaphysical hypotheses work in childish thinking and judgmentation, which is to say the child is able to come to satisficing equilibriums by employing them. For that reason, they get built into the foundations of childish maxims and habits of thinking as expedient judgments of taste and are carried forward into adulthood, often for life. Only a sound education in philosophy or encountering a traumatic paradox will provoke a person enough that he begins to question his habits of thinking and there-by becomes cognizant of and objectively alters his metaphysical hypotheses.

A philosopher brings his metaphysical hypotheses to a state of conscious understanding and works to ensure they are congruent with the entirety of his philosophical system. A philosophizer merely uses the ones he has made for himself without examining or reflecting upon them. The two principal metaphysical hypotheses Pulliam and Patten present are idealism and (non-naïve) realism. In the context they present, these mean the following: (1) idealism is any doctrine that premises "reality" is fundamentally mental in nature [Blackburn (1996)]. The philosophies of Berkeley, Descartes, Leibniz and Plato are good representatives of this doctrine; (2) realism is any doctrine that premises the real existence of some kind of thing or some kind of fact or state of

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affairs [ibid.]. Aristotle, Newton, Locke, the Greek atomists, and most physical-natural scientists are representatives of realism doctrines. The premises in both cases are metaphysical hypotheses.

Perhaps you can spot the underlying speciousness in making this logical division between idealism and realism. Even idealism posits that something called "reality" is real. Isn't that realism? If it isn't, then the definition of realism is not self-consistent. In practice, what idealism and realism do as doctrines is call upon an ontology-centered presupposition and speak not of the Dasein of "real things" (which both doctrines accept) but rather of the Nature of the Existenz of those real things. Doctrines of realism tend toward empiricism; doctrines of idealism tend toward rationalism. There are exceptions to this, such as is the case with Berkeley. Both doctrines subtly leave out the person who judges and understands. They are attempts to play God in theoretical speculation, i.e., "If I were God I'd set the universe up like this."

Kant's philosophy adopts both hypotheses but conditions their employment according to the reflective perspective one is using for judging and thinking about the subject-matter. He wrote, "A transcendental idealist is an empirical realist" – by which he meant a distinction between how a person perceives and understands Objects and how he places the object of perception or understanding in context with other objects in Nature. The first perspective pertains to the metaphysics of Rational Psychology, the second to the metaphysics of comprehending systematic Reality. Kant's philosophy is a representative of neither idealism nor realism, nor is it a case of what ontology-centered philosophers call "dualism." He was able to construct this doctrine because the doctrine is not ontology-centered and it makes necessity-for-the-possibility-of-experience the core metaphysical hypothesis of the Critical doctrine [Kant (1787) B: xvii-xviii].

A movement is a collective effort by a more or less allied group of mini-Communities who join together temporarily to promote or oppose some innovation and the actualization of its Object. It has for its aim the realization or prevention of some innovation to an already existing institution or the establishment of a new institution. Among different kinds of movements, two common ones are education movements and political movements. In the 20th century, the distinction between the two often became blurred. Leaders of movements fit the mold of what Toynbee called a "creative minority" who seek to change something about their Society and to attract its majority membership into accepting or at least acquiescing to the change.

Labeling is a nominal stereotyping of some group of people. A label is what the labelers call the stereotype. Labeling seeks to replace understanding the people so-labeled with an abstract person (a mathematical entity) for purposes of classification. Labeling can be scientifically and usefully employed, as when psychiatrists try to classify personality disorders in order to develop treatment procedures for individuals exhibiting symptoms of such disorders. They can also be employed maliciously as propaganda tools, and this is the predominant use to which labeling was put during the reform conflicts in the 20th century. The insidious aspect of propaganda labeling is that the labels tend to be made habitual and worked into how people view different opinions and proposals concerning institutional reforms. Labeling so-used frequently leads to conflicts.

Pragmatism is a genus that understands a family of closely related philosophies sharing the same top-level general concepts but differing in the details or definitions of concepts at lower levels. There are four major schools of pragmatism: the Peirce school, the James school, the Bode school, and the Dewey school. Frequently education theorists tend to minimize differences between these schools but this cannot be done reliably because those differences lead to different outcomes. It is not the first time in the history of philosophy that people have had some difficulty recognizing that different schools within the same genus of philosophy are distinct species of speculation and theory. Such was the case with the Stoics of ancient Greece and with the Greek Epicureans as well [Cicero (45 BC)]. The differences between divers schools under a common genus of philosophical theory are much less than their differences with a school under another

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genus, and it is the commonalities these schools share from their top-level general concepts that often make it difficult to differentiate them. The Bode and Dewey schools differ only slightly.

The Dewey school was the philosophy that had the greatest effect on 20th century reforms. Dewey variously described his philosophy as pragmatism, instrumentalism, and experimentalism. These labels refer to specific perspectives taken in the application of his philosophy in specific contexts. Dewey's use of a system of perspectives somewhat recalls to mind Kant's three general Standpoints in Critical metaphysics proper. It is because Dewey also had a system of perspectives that philosophers and educators have sometimes had a difficult time classifying his philosophy into one of the neat little pigeonholes of traditional loosely defined philosophy-taxonomies.

Brameld produced an applied philosophy that he called "social reconstructionism" [Brameld (1956)]. The social reconstructionist movement was active during the Great Depression and can be regarded as a group that broke with the progressive movement because it was not progressive enough for them. A social reconstructionist movement is a political movement masquerading as a philosophy in much the same way that Marxism is a political movement masquerading as a philosophy. There is a notable difference: Marxism admits it is a political doctrine and social reconstructionists typically do not. Engels described Marxism as "a distinctive body of social and political theory constructed out of the most advanced developments in philosophy, political economy and socialism." The philosophy to which he refers is Hegel's philosophy. The so-called "development in political economy" is, of course, Marx's Kapital, which is a skillfully-crafted work of propaganda disguised as a treatise on economics. One thing social reconstructionism and Marxism share in common is that both are antisocial movements championing the despot's notion that a class of elites knows what is best for everyone and, by dint of that superior knowledge, ought to be allowed to rule over a Society and dictate how it is to operate.

It is not an accident that such a view resonates so closely with the ant-like communism under the rule of philosopher-kings advocated by Plato in the dialogue whose title is traditionally mistranslated as Republic16. Hegel saw himself as the historically inevitable heir of Plato. He as much as tells us this himself in Hegel (c. 1805-30), pp. 49-68, where he makes it plain enough he thought that if Plato had thought things through a bit better, he would have been Hegel.

The social reconstructionist movements were at their most active during the Great Depression. Social reconstructionists of that period promoted educational reforms designed for the indoctrination of children in accordance with a goal of re-making American Society according to a political-socialist mold. An individual person counts as nothing in this scheme. Hegel wrote,

Individuality, however, is not to be understood to mean the immediate or natural individual, as when we speak of individual things or individual men: for that special phase of individuality does not appear until we come to the judgment. Every function and 'moment' of the notion is itself the whole notion; but the individual or subject is the notion expressly put as a totality. [Hegel (1827), pg. 227]

After crawling through the twisting, winding, dreary labyrinth of Hegel's logic, what Hegel means by this opaque passage is that you and I, as individuals, are nothing before there is the universal state (which, at our phase in Hegel's view of history, would mean the political union of a country). In other words, the country defines us; we do not define the country. Without the Absolute-Country, 'you' and 'I' are meaningless. With the Absolute-Country, the individual is specified by analysis using the negation notion of Quality and the plurality notion of Quantity.

In relationship to human Nature, and using Hegel's terminology, this is Absolute Hogwash.

16 There is not one thing in the least bit "republican" in Plato's "Republic." Its Greek title, Πολιτεια, is more properly translated as "Body Politic" [Liddell & Scott (1996)]

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Nonetheless, history proves it is possible to raise a fanatical generation if those people are indoctrinated from childhood into unquestioning belief in their rulers and in the wisdom of the tyranny they impose. The Nazis amply proved this with their Hitler Youth (as the testimony of many of its survivors demonstrates). Sparta provides another example. Such is what the end result of social reconstructionism would have been despite the intentions of its individual proponents, who did sincerely think their prescriptions would lead to a better world. The movement was a pseudo-doctrine of philosophasters utterly contradicting the mental physics of human Nature. In time the pure institution such a movement sets up inevitably destroys its Society.

Attitude is the totality of acts of motoregulatory expression and ratio-expression, approved by the process of practical judgment in accordance with the manifold of practical rules, that orients the motivational dynamic in a person's dynamical process of judgmentation. To orient means: (1) in thinking, to determine judgmentation according to a subjective principle with insufficiency in objective principles of Reason for the holding-to-be-true of concepts; (2) in acting, to determine an action judged expedient for the negation of the intensive magnitude of Lust per se; and (3) in general, to determine according to a subjective principle of holding-to-be-binding under the categorical imperative of pure practical Reason. These are technical definitions from mental physics, but in the present context what they mean for this discussion is: that a great many people who were involved in the 20th century reform controversies, and whose orientations of attitude came to be labeled as "educational philosophies," were merely acting upon subjective conviction and enthusiasm grounded entirely in personal judgments of taste. Compatibilities and similarities in appearances expressing these judgments provided subjectively sufficient grounds for alliances to form and movements to take hold. That is not philosophy; it is merely mass opinion. Mill wrote,

The rules which [people] obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. This all but universal illusion is one of the examples of the magical influence of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says, a second nature, but is continually mistaken for the first. The effect of custom, in preventing any misgivings respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given by one person to others, or by each to himself. People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief by some who aspire to the character of philosophers, that their feelings on subjects of this nature are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. The practical principle which guides them in their opinions on the regulation of human conduct is the feeling in each person's mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathizes, would like them to act. No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person's preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people's liking instead of one. [Mill (1859), pp. 4-5]

§ 5. Philosophizing in the 20th Century Reform Conflicts

§ 5.1 The Socio-political Spectrum of Reform Controversies

It is a readily observed behavioral phenomenon that, whenever the context of judgment is the consideration of change or reformation (of existing customs, institutions, styles, theories, etc.), people individually tend to lump other people together in terms of mini-Communities of opinions, and to associate themselves with one of these labeled groups. Self-labeling is carried out according to the person's judgment of the compatibility of the ideas of others in that selected group with his own. Attitudes toward changes that are shared more or less in common by the members of the select group then tend to be characterized by their degree of aversion to change or

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Figure 13.2: The socio-political spectrum of reform controversies.

enthusiasm for change. The degree of aversion or enthusiasm is exhibited in the normal range of actions and displayed preferences of the members of the group. Possible actions and preferences in regard to attitudes toward change range across a spectrum having two endpoints. At these endpoints attitudes can be described as "change nothing" on the one side and "change everything" on the other. People whose actions and attitudes tend toward the former are exhibiting judgments of taste that are primarily determined as feelings of Lust for the status quo and feelings of Unlust for variation or change in the familiar17. People whose actions and attitudes tend toward the latter are exhibiting judgments of taste determined as feelings of Lust for change and feelings of Unlust for the status quo. At the one extreme are found people who are in the main living in a state of equilibrium with the status quo (and therefore feel Lust for things remaining the way they are), and at the other one finds people who are living in a state of disequilibrium with respect to the status quo (and therefore feel Unlust for things remaining the way they are). Feelings of Lust represent subjective judgments of expedience favoring maintaining or preserving an existing condition; feelings of Unlust represent subjective judgments of expedience favoring abolishing an existing condition.

Social theorists have long practiced describing differences in such attitudes by means of a sort of taxonomy for describing different intensities in the degree of feelings of Lust or Unlust that appear to characterize different individuals or groups. Figure 13.2 illustrates one such taxonomy, which is the one I employ in this treatise. You must always be aware that the boundaries between different classifications are never 'crisp' boundaries but, rather, the attitudes meld gradually into each other like the manifold colors in a color spectrum. The point denoted 'social mean' in figure 13.2 indicates a balance between feelings of Lust and Unlust and the corresponding attitudes are ones of preference for moderation in making adjustments and changes. As we proceed in the direction of the left-hand endpoint, preferences are more and more given over to favoring ever smaller and finer adjustments made ever more gradually. At the end denoted 'reactionary' the preference is to preserve things precisely the way they are. In contrast, as we move in the opposite direction the preferences become increasingly inclined to favor larger changes made more rapidly until, at the right-most endpoint, the individual is inclined to favor the complete overthrow of the status quo and to change everything immediately.

Both endpoints are radical in that word's connotation denoting something's basic or root parts. Reactionary judgments are radical for preservation and conservation, reconstructionary judgments are radical for abolition and accommodation. It is an error in language usage to assign the word 'radical' to one extreme and not the other. Furthermore, these judgments are always ad hoc. A person who is reconstructionary in regard to an institution is usually reactionary when in regard to 17 Feelings of Lust (pronounced 'loost') and feelings of Unlust (pronounced 'un-loost') are technical terms in Critical metaphysics. The German words Lust and Unlust have no English equivalents and, specifically, the German word Lust does not mean the same thing as the English word 'lust.' The English word comes from Anglo Saxon (Old English), whereas Lust descends from High German. The High German, Low German, Old Saxon, and Anglo Saxon languages all broke away from a common ancestor language, named West Germanic, c. 450 AD. Refer to the glossary for explanations of the terms Lust and Unlust.

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Figure 13.3: Increasing extremism in controversies that results from establishment of antibonding relationships leading to social granulation through uncivil competition between mini-Communities.

making changes and accommodations in his own ideas and attitudes. There is no such thing as a person who is reactionary, conservative or etc.18 People are only reactionary, conservative, or etc. with regard to specific judgments of taste pertaining to specific matters of choice. Dewey and others who allied themselves in what became known as the Progressive Education Movement were anti-conservative (favored changing the institution of public education) in the first two decades of the 20th century. As this movement gained political dominance, "the progressives" became increasingly conservative – and eventually reactionary – in regard to challenges being mounted to their ideas by other education movements or by members within their own. Their ideas and programs had become "the establishment" in education politics. As they did the mini-Community became increasingly reactionary in regard to altering this establishment.

As a social phenomenon, this is certainly not unique in the history of human behavior. On the contrary, it is by far the normal behavior and examples can be found in every sphere of social circumstances stretching back as far as history can take us. The phenomenon has its genesis in a form of moral re-staging in judgmentation produced by over-generalized stereotyping of the members of other mini-Communities. When a person erects a stereotype to serve as a model for judgment in regard to another mini-Community, the act of stereotyping represents the people of that mini-Community by means of an abstract corporate person, and this model is always the product of inferences of analogy. The principle of inferences of analogy is the principle of specification: things of one genus that agree in many marks of recognition agree in all marks as they are known in one object but not in another. This inference is always the product of a judgment of taste and is always grounded in some subjectively sufficient reason. But, at the same time, it lacks an objectively sufficient reason. The judgment expands the given marks of an object by positing in that object additional marks that are not given through experience but, rather, through the synthesis of imagination. These inferences are capable of producing fantasies of both bogeymen and angels.

18 There are some people who self-develop peculiar maxims of Duty-to-Self in regard to external situation by which they come to think that they have an obligation to make themselves "non-hypocrites" by forcing themselves to adhere only to, e.g., so-called "conservative" or so-called "liberal" principles, whether or not they actually feel Lust or Unlust for some particular specific reform. These people label themselves and then determine their actions not according to their attitude toward specific reforms but, rather, according to an attitude of "not-appearing-hypocritical." Psychiatrists call this an obsessive-compulsive personality style. It is a behavior associated with people who have developed relatively narrow and rigid practical maxims in their manifold of rules aligned along the tectly processive axis of the D-PIPOS circumplex (Drivers and Analytics). Their actions exhibit inhibited and detached operationalizations (see figure 8.1). It is not technically accurate to say these people "are" reactionary, conservative, or etc. They are merely rigid.

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Stereotyping is expedient for rapid satisfaction of the dictates of pure practical Reason (a process that knows no objects and feels no feelings). All human beings are satisficing decision makers in regard to their chosen actions. The character of the regulation of Self-determinations by practical Reason is impatient. Modeling members of other mini-Communities by stereotyping is, therefore, an effective heuristic of judgmentation for establishing practical rules of re-equilibration in response to disturbances to equilibrium.

But stereotyping also has a side effect in judgmentation that can and often does have a social ill effect. Figure 13.3 is intended to illustrate this effect: Stereotyping tends to promote responses to equilibrium disturbances by means of type-α compensation behaviors. This means the response to disturbance is to attempt to remove or abolish the object judged to be causing the disturbance. The attempt tends to promote uncivil interpersonal interactions between people in different mini-Communities. These, in turn, tend to provoke establishment of antibonding relationships in the social chemistry of mini-Community interaction. As type-α compensations are, in the main, acts of negation, interactions arising from this form of compensation behavior tend to promote judgments of taste where expedience is vested in inclinations to choose what are popularly called "negative" operationalizations. This tends to then provoke negative reactions by others. Examples include name-calling, impugning the character or motives of others, issuing vicious propaganda pronouncements, and other such types of actions that abolish conditions required for cooperation and promote those that foster uncivil competitive interactions in a localized state-of-nature.

Figure 13.3 illustrates what usually happens under circumstances of this sort. Antibonding relationships are set up between mini-Communities. As uncivil actions continue to be employed, each mini-Community pushes the other toward more extreme attitudes and judgments along the spectrum of controversy. At some point, reconciliation between the two mini-Communities become impractical to achieve and an outright rupturing occurs within the parent Society. This is because the controversy undergoes a shift of focus by both factions away from whatever the original provocative objective issue or circumstance was. It refocuses competitive behaviors on individuals' privately-held higher moral maxims and practical imperatives pertaining to practical rules of Obligation-to-Self in regard to one's own person. There is no quicker or surer route to creating a personal enemy than to attack another person at the point of his private practical imperatives of Obligation-to-Self in regard to his own person. The result is a sort of jihad that breaks out between the now-uncivil competitors. Both factions now commit actions that violate the terms and conditions of the social compact of the larger Community in which they are embedded. Thus both groups are committing unjust actions. To the degree these actions are intentional, the factions commit deontological moral crimes against the overall parent Society. The principle of majority rule, which is the first principle of social governance by non-consensus democracy, is an incentive principle for factions to commit moral crimes against the very Society they quite sincerely seek to benefit and serve.

§5.2 Brameld's Taxonomy

Various authors and commentators employ different sets of labels for describing so-called "educational philosophies" of the 20th century. Frequently during the 20th century conflicts over public education these labels were used to stereotype different factions as well as to serve as tools of propaganda for vilifying opponents. In most cases of label-assigning the nominal labels used are a mere collection of names often reflecting the author's or commentator's personal judgments of taste in regard to how he views the divers factions. For the most part, these labels do not appear in either Blackburn's or Mautner's dictionaries of accepted philosophical terms and are not professionally recognized in philosophy as "philosophies." Some authors, e.g. Pulliam & Patten (2007), use the names of recognized philosophies to describe particular movements but the claim that those philosophies are "educational philosophies" cannot be supported other than in the loose

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sense that all theoretical philosophies attempt to speak generally and so would have one or another set of implications for the activity of education. Many developers of named philosophies do in fact comment on education either briefly or at length. When they do, these comments often occur en passant during discussions of something else. Rarely, however, do those philosophers set out a developed system of education philosophy instead of merely commenting upon one or a few aspects of educating. For example, Kant, Aristotle, and Plato all made comments concerning education and schooling but none of them ever developed a philosophy of education and all of them mixed comments reflecting their personal opinions in with other comments regarding some implications their philosophical systems had for education.

All speculative theories of education are to some degree products of philosophizing but, as I have already pointed out, this is not the same thing as "having" a philosophy in the proper sense of the word. It is generally quite incorrect to label any of the 20th century's education movements using the name of any of the recognized systems of philosophy from the past. For example, the progressive movement in the first decades of the 20th century is often said to have pragmatism as its "educational philosophy." It is quite true that Dewey and Bode both adhered to pragmatism schools of philosophy, but the progressive movement as a whole had no philosophy at its core. Dewey and Bode both came to criticize the movement on precisely this point. The agōgē of ancient Sparta came closer to having a philosophy at its foundation than did the 20th century progressive movement in education. If we were to similarly mislabel the agōgē, we would call it Stoicism [Kennell (1995), pp. 98-114]. A philosophy is a discipline and requires discipline in thinking. That word can certainly be applied to the Spartans; were I to choose a single adjective to over-generalize the progressive movement of the 20th century, I would choose "undisciplined."

In the 20th century there was only one systematic attempt to classify so-called educational philosophies with a systematic taxonomy. This was carried out by Theodore Brameld, who was a minor 20th century philosopher sometimes loosely described as a pragmatist, sometimes loosely described as a Marxist, sometimes dismissed as a troublemaker, and sometimes called by other names. Today his work has become widely ignored and he becomes a more obscure figure in the history of philosophy with every passing year. Indeed, it is becoming difficult to find any but the most superficial references to him and his books in the current literature.

What one chooses to call him has no pertinence for this treatise. It is enough to know that his philosophical outlook was ontology-centered, his method bore much similarity to that endorsed by pragmatism with occasional Hegelian influences, his analysis was sometimes colored by his own judgments of taste (which on occasion seems to have led him to make serious mistakes in interpreting different philosophical systems), and he tells us in his later theory that his taxonomy is incomplete [Brameld (1971), pg. 63]. He tells us his way of philosophizing is a "spiral-like (or, if one prefers, dialectical) process," a description reminiscent of Hegelian methodology [ibid., pg. xi]. My own opinion after reading his earlier (1950) and later (1971) theories is that: (1) Brameld philosophizes from the foundation of an unexamined personal (hence dogmatic) metaphysic; (2) he does carry out his work in a philosophical manner; and (3) that he did produce a taxonomy that is objective insofar as it is possible for him to be objective given the effect of (1) on his logical deductions.

He described his later and notably less strident philosophizing as philosophy "regarded within a cultural framework that shall be termed culturology," which he described thusly:

[The] distinguishing feature of culturology is this: culture is regarded as the fulcrum of an effort to interpret the meaning of man, his existence, and his actions. [ibid., pg. 14]

In order to avoid an unintended implication of disparagement that some might read into seeing "educational philosophy" constantly being written with quotation marks, what Brameld called an

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"educational philosophy" I am going to call a "possible applied philosophy of education" or PAPE. By this I intend to convey that a PAPE has at least some of the ingredients needed to make a proper applied philosophy, but is something less than a proper applied philosophy. Brameld based his taxonomy of PAPEs on descriptions of what he called beliefs about reality, beliefs about knowledge, and beliefs about values19. This gives his taxonomy three dimensions of analysis reflecting the traditional view that philosophy itself can be regarded in terms of a three-fold dimensioning along axes of ontology, epistemology, and axiology. Note that beliefs about reality, etc. are not the same things as ontology, epistemology, or axiology, which are systematic doctrines. A belief functions as a metaphysical hypothesis.

Brameld (1971) fashions what he called an "instrument" for assessing peoples' dispositions in regard to values. He called this his I-M-T-R instrument (innovative-moderative-transmissive-restorative). If one takes the word "innovative" to imply making a radical transformation then Brameld's PAPE taxonomy is an I-T-M-R assessment of educational dispositions. Here I use "disposition" in its dictionary connotation of "the temper or frame of mind as directed to particular objects." So used, the word can be placed in a practical context with Critical inclination (Neigung)20 and, with that, can be placed in a practical context with Critical disposition (Gessinnung)21. By doing so, divers movements in education reform can be placed, at different stages of their evolution, in context with the spectrum of reform controversies figure 13.2 lays out. Figure 13.4 illustrates the empirical alignment. It also depicts the way in which the manner of and disposition toward change and reform stands in relationship to Order in a civil Community.

Brameld defined four categories of PAPEs. These were picked up and used by many educators and reformers. Brameld also defined five "anticipations" – i.e., speculations not yet developed to the point where they could properly be called PAPEs according to his method of taxonomy. In one important way, having a name to use to designate a PAPE was injurious to social Order because they were used in propaganda by various individuals during the reform conflicts. Dewey himself had established a precedent for doing this, a deontologically irresponsible leader's action.

Figure 13.4: Alignment of Brameld's I-T-M-R instrumentation of dispositions with the socio-political

spectrum of reform controversies. The top line denotes how the manner of and disposition toward change and reform stands in relationship to Order in a civil Community.

19 in a non-deontological and non-Critical context for the word "value." 20 habitual sensuous appetite. An inclination is regarded as a necessitated appetite for a particular object of Desire. 21 a first subjective ground for the adoption of a practical rule or maxim.

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Brameld based his classification system on his evaluation of what the people he stereotyped as belonging to a PAPE held for beliefs about the ontology of reality, epistemological criteria for knowledge, and axiology of value [Brameld (1971), pg. 45]. However, he provides no specific real explanation by which we are to understand what he means by 'reality,' 'knowledge,' or 'value,' or even if he means the same thing in the case of each PAPE. He tells us,

Although we shall try to characterize [reality, knowledge, and value] as they have been familiarly characterized in the conventional terms of philosophy, it is worth noting that even these are not acceptable to all philosophers today. Also, we shall usually defer concrete illustrations since they will become abundant when applied to practicing philosophies of education. [Brameld (1971), pg. 45]

This tells us three things. First, whatever Brameld's personal metaphysical basis was, it was an ontology-centered basis. Second, he admits that ontology-centered philosophies do not know and cannot say what any of these terms mean. Third, this warns us his classification of PAPEs can be made no otherwise than as a nominal classification founded upon subjective judgments of taste. These are serious objections to his classification system, but in fairness to Brameld no other ontology-centered philosopher would have likely been able to do any better.

The classification system Brameld produced had four categories he described as follows:

1. Progressivism: Education as cultural moderation (1971) or transition (1950); 2. Essentialism: Education as cultural transmission (1971) or conservation (1950); 3. Perennialism: Education as cultural restoration (1971) or regression (1950); 4. Reconstructionism: Education as cultural transformation (1971) or renascence

(1950).

These descriptions apparently are to be regarded as characterizations of what each class of PAPE holds-to-be the proper function of education in a Society. If so, that very premise necessarily implies a presupposition that there is only one function of education in Society and, furthermore, whatever that function is, it must be one of these four. It is worth taking note of the changes that appear between Brameld's 1950 and 1971 formulations. The former has the flavor of a strident activism (transition, conservation, regression, renascence) that the 1971 formulation considerably moderates (moderative, transmissive, restorative, innovative).

The divers education mini-Communities embroiled in the 20th century controversies did in fact characterize educators from other factions in precisely Brameld's 1950 manner but resisted hearing their own movement narrowly described in like terms. Thus, whatever Brameld intended or presumed, these descriptions were used in practice and the practices became the de facto popularized explanations for the categories.

However, such usages are prima facie absurd. Unless the Society is an arrested Society, its culture will change as time passes, and so education must in that case be an agency for moderating that change. If a Society is to preserve itself and not undergo disintegration, something must serve to transmit its culture to each new generation and so public education must be an agency (not necessarily the only one, but an agency nonetheless) for cultural transmission. If a Society is to benefit from past experience and avoid repeating mistakes and errors committed by previous generations, it must first remember that past and the only systematic way of doing so is by instructing its members in the lessons of its heritage. This is not cultural restoration but rather heritage preservation. In point of fact, no major reform movement of the 20th century can be factually accused of working to "restore" a vanished culture, but that accusation was leveled at the movements stereotyped as "perennialism." Finally, if a Society is to achieve Progress, both for its corporate self and its individual members, it must be capable of transforming itself to meet

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the new challenges it faces – and education is, once again, one of the agencies in a Society tasked with providing for this capability. If we replace "cultural restoration" with "heritage appreciation" then all four of Brameld's 1971 functions are necessary aims for the institution of public instructional education. Any "single-issue" presupposition for a classification is not only false but conducive to witch hunts for "hidden agendas."

The label "perennialism" is not necessarily pejorative although opponents of reform proposals that were so-labeled used the word pejoratively. The term itself derives from philosophia perennis, which translates directly into English as "perennial philosophy." Calling it "perennial theologizing" is more accurate. Mautner's dictionary explains the meaning and usage of this term:

philosophia perennis: The common philosophical heritage of mankind: a body of fundamental philosophical truths which can command universal assent. This notion occurs especially in neo-scholastic thought. Sometimes the claim is made that a particular system, e.g. that of Aquinas, preeminently contains the philosophia perennis. The expression can be traced to Augustinus Steuchius's book De philosophia perenni (1540), which attempted to reconcile ancient philosophy and Christian belief. [Mautner (2000)]

It is true that the German Idealism of Fichte, Herbart, and Hegel swept through American higher education immediately after the Civil War of 1861-5. It is also true that many college professors of the era did adopt the stance that education had a religious and moral mission to perform [Vesey (1965)]. College education for most of the latter half of the 19th century could be accurately described in the misused connotation "perennialism" came to carry in the 20th. Between 1880 and 1910 there occurred a major revolution in higher education that overthrew the dominance of the Hegelians in higher education, all but eradicated the quasi-seminary quality of American colleges, and put in place the system of specialization and division we know today [ibid].

§ 6. The Educators' Movements

An "Old Guard" among those committed to Hegelianism in its overtly theological form fought a losing battle against the ending of a spiritualist and religious basis for education. In it the label of perennialism, when it was used in a civic manner by the Progressive Education Movement, is accurate. Among the most notable of the "Old Guard" in the early half of the 20th century were the influential Josiah Royce (1855-1916), who was a Harvard professor of philosophy and history, and his former student, Professor Herman Horne (1874-1936), who likewise advocated a spiritual and religious basis for education. However, by 1910 spiritual perennialism was by and large a spent force in public education as it was being practiced. In the 20th century ideological fellow travelers of these theological philosophizers were largely comprised of fundamentalist Protestants who occasionally became involved in public schooling controversies. They were and are not a dominant force, nor can they be said to follow a philosophy. Ministers within these divers sects might be trained in a theology since in many cases these people attended a seminary school. If so, I have found no evidence of this theology being taught to their parishioners, and in the more extreme evangelical sects I have found no evidence of anything that merits being called a theology at all.

Although spiritual perennialism is a spent force in the institution of public education, it is not an extinguished force, nor should it be. I discuss why in chapter 14. A majority of Americans are and always have been religious people. Liberty to choose one's religion and follow it, within the restriction of not infringing upon the liberties of citizens who do not choose to follow it, has been a strong civil factor in American folkways. Religious institutes have sometimes acted as uncivil agents in American Society when a religious faction attempts to have its peculiar religious tenets codified by law and when it engages in the persecution of other religions, usually minority faiths. Both actions are in open violation of the American social compact and constitute deontological

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moral crimes against American Society. It is frequently propagandized that Protestant Christianity founded America. This is untrue. Calvinism founded the Puritan colonies and that is all the extent to which an objectively valid claim can be made that religion founded any part of America. At last check, there didn't seem to be any Puritans on the local tax rolls in Boston. In the many years since 1620 America has opened her arms to people of almost every recognized faith on earth and this has on the whole strengthened the corporate Personfähigkeit of the United States.

The perennialism label properly denotes only a spiritualist-theological element in education. It was, nonetheless, later applied to a Western heritage movement advocating for a liberal education in the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences. This bore the name "the Great Books movement" (c. 1936-1969). Stereotyping this movement by calling it perennialism was grossly misleading propaganda that at times stooped to making vicious personal attacks on the character, motives, and religions of leading Great Books proponents [Ravitch (2000), pp. 298-306]. I regard these actions, speaking personally now from my own judgment of taste, as contemptible, bigoted, and hypocritical to the professed ideals of progressivism. Deontologically, this propaganda constituted uncivil violation of some of the most common moral customs in the United States.

The leading proponents of the Great Books movement were Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977), Mortimer Adler (1902-2001), Stringfellow Barr (1897-1982), Scott Buchanan (1895-1968), Alexander Meiklejohn (1872-1964), Jacques Barzun (1907-2012), and Mark Van Doren (1894-1972). Of all the movements in the 20th century, the Great Books movement came closest to advocating an educational reform similar to proposals made by Jefferson, Rush, Knox, Smith, and others at the close of the 18th and the early 19th centuries (chapter 6). The principal weakness of this movement was that, as it was described by its proponents, it expressed no clear ideas or proposals for how to implement its reforms. You cannot ask a ten-year-old to read Tolstoy or Aristotle and expect to accomplish very much of any educational worth. The Great Books movement focused too much on books and not enough on people. It was clearly an academicians' movement that did not offer to explain, and perhaps did not know, how it could be projected from the college level down to the public school level or across into adult education outside of the college setting. It did know how to rouse the fury and wrath of the Progressive Education movement. Nonetheless, it is an error to discard the Great Books idea completely.

The Progressive Education movement was the dominant faction in the 20th century reform conflicts. It was the only one originally grounded in an applied philosophy. (The spiritual perennialism movement was grounded in theology). Its philosophical founder was, of course, John Dewey (1859-1952). Its other two most prominent authority figures were Boyd Henry Bode (1873-1953) and William Heard Kilpatrick (1871-1965). Dewey and Bode were philosophers. Kilpatrick is properly to be called an educologist and a philosophizer on the topic of education, this despite the fact he held an academic chair entitled 'professor of philosophy of education.' Kilpatrick was Dewey's student, and Dewey once wrote that he "was the best I ever had." The two men formed a very close personal and professional bond with each other. In comparison, the bond between Bode and these two was more strictly professional and can be compared to a social chemistry ionic bond, while that between Dewey and Kilpatrick would be metaphorically called a covalent bond.

In their lifetimes, Kilpatrick was frequently called "Dewey's chief educational interpreter." The label appears to be accurate, but the labeling brings forward a circumstance not to be over-looked when examining any movement claiming to be predicated upon a philosophy. If it is accurate to call Kilpatrick "Dewey's interpreter," the clear implication is that Dewey's philosophy needed to be interpreted in order for others to understand it (or to think they understand it). Philosophy, in contrast to philosophizing, is one of the most – and perhaps even the most – complex and intertwined forms of theoretical speculation human beings undertake. It cannot avoid using its own technical language and, like all the specialized disciplines, it uses familiar

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words to mean something-not-quite-the-same as conventional usages. Even when it uses conventional words in their conventional usage of the time, language itself changes over the passage of years. Old meanings slowly become archaic or obsolete; new meanings are imposed on old words by metaphor and analogy. The effect of this is that what later students of a philosophy understand by the classical writings and what the philosopher intended for them to understand drift apart. The only solution for this problem is to somehow "freeze" the meanings of words. In the case of my writings, I do this by picking Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1962) as a reference standard when I use common non-technical words in a philosophical discourse.

Most philosophers habitually don't take this precaution. Kant and many other learned scholars up through the 18th century would drop into Latin or ancient Greek when they wanted to fix the meaning of an important term. The scholars of yesteryear used dead languages in precisely the same way modern scientists use mathematics (another dead language) and for precisely the same reason. But most philosophers do not and, historically, this has meant that the writings of philosophers tread a fine line between degrees of profundity and disingenuousness. If they drift across that line, the disingenuousness is unintended but nonetheless is a real effect of language. Every author and speaker is well served by heeding the old proverb: If you do not say what you mean then you do not mean what you say.

In the case of Dewey's philosophy, there is a degree of disingenuousness in his use of the word "democracy." The word "democracy" has almost become a sacred word in American Society, but it was almost a profanity to many of the Framers of the U.S. Constitution. The sacredness of this word in 20th century America was nearly guaranteed to provide an almost magical attraction for the many Americans drawn to the Progressive movement. But the way Dewey used the word and what most Americans understand by it are not the same thing. The context (Zusammenhang) is crucially different in the two usages. Critically, this can and very often does make an enormous difference in what divers people understand and how they act on the basis of this understanding. Here it is Critically crucial to remember that every thing is real in some contexts, unreal in other contexts, and non-real in still others. The first means "objectively valid in actual sensuous experience"; the second means "objectively invalid in actual sensuous experience"; the third means "stands outside the scope of meanings pertinent to a particular context." The ghost of Hamlet's father is real as a character in Shakespeare's play, unreal as an actual entity haunting castles in Denmark, and non-real as a factor of wheat production in Kansas.

Dewey wrote,

Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a democratic community more interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and those who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute to voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experiences. The expansion in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remained suppressed as long as the inclinations to action are only partial, as they

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must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests. [Dewey (1916), pp. 95-96]

A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. [ibid., pg. 108]

Dewey describes a particular form of Society here and he is calling that Society a "democracy." But he is quite wrong when he says "A democracy is more than a form of government." The word "democracy" denotes nothing more and nothing less than a species of community governance. In particular instantiations it might be a civil institution of governance for a civil Community; in others it might be an institution of rulership. Dewey wishes the word "democracy" to mean more than it actually does mean by generally accepted conventions, and he fails to adequately note that democracy is a species of community governance in which is found many different varieties.

If the word was one unfamiliar to his readers and unestablished through long conventions of language, he would have had the philological license to employ it in the manner he does. But because his context is public education for the members of a Society, it is disingenuous for him to appropriate the word "democracy" as a metaphorical name for the Object he is trying to describe. His audience of readers will not for the most part grasp or accept an old name of a familiar Object to hold a meaning implication that is different from that to which they are long habituated.

I think it is not unlikely Dewey himself thought he was describing an ideal democracy; such a supposition is consistent with the categorical statements he makes, e.g., "a democratic community [is] more interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate and systematic education." But this categorical statement is prima facie false. Sparta had a keener interest in deliberate and systematic education than any other city-state in ancient Helena, and it was not remotely a democracy. Athens was a city-state under the governance of a pure democracy – the first known to Western history – yet institution of education in Athens cannot seriously be called either deliberate or systematic. Neither of its two most eminent residents who wrote or spoke on the subject of education – Plato and Aristotle – favored democracy as a form of government. Plato's ideal body politic was the oligarchy under philosopher-kings he writes of in Πολιτεα (mistranslated as "Republic"). Aristotle called democracy "a perversion of government."

If you examine closely what Dewey wrote, you should be able to see that he does not in fact actually define 'democracy.' One does not define an Object by making statements describing this or that characteristic of its appearance. That is not a definition but, rather, a description, and the word used to designate an Object exhibiting such marks is a nominal designation, not a real explanation (a Realerklärung, in Critical terminology). There is no automatic censure to be made of this unless, for the technical terminology you are working to establish, the nominal designation chosen has one socially-accepted meaning implication while the Object to which you apply it is something otherwise. That is the case here.

Bode was clearer in stating Dewey's definition:

The discussion, so far, has attempted to give prominence to those elements that must be recognized in an attempt to give a definition of democracy. These elements are (1) that our tradition of democracy is an embodiment of the demand for the fullest possible expression of native capacity in the individual, (2) that it is a larger and more vital thing than any set mode of conduct through which it may have found expression in the past, (3) that this expression of native capacity must come through cooperation based on mutual recognition of interests and through progressive modification of institutions and practices. Democracy, then, may be defined as a social organization that aims to promote cooperation among its members and with other groups on the basis of mutual recognition of interests. [Bode (1927), pp. 13-14]

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Well, yes, what Bode says (and Dewey was trying to say) is true. But this is also a "definition" fitting the Gemeinschaft Society of the BaMbuti Pygmies, the republic of Rome, the city-state of Sparta, the British Raj in colonial India, the Roman Catholic Church, the Fourth Caliphate of Islam under Ali ibn Abi Tâlib, and the American Republic of the Framers of the Constitution of the United States. What progressivism called "democracy" is in reality nothing else than the civil Community of any association of people united by a social contract.

The practical Realerklärung of propaganda is the effort or the activity by which an initiating communicator intends to manage the attitudes and actions of others through playing on their preexisting biases with messages designed largely to appeal to their emotions and/or irrationality [Merrill & Lowenstein (1971), pg. 214]. The misuse of the word 'democracy' by the fathers of the Progressive Education movement stops short of being propaganda only through lack of an intent to manage attitudes and actions. I have no doubt Dewey, Kilpatrick, and Bode never intended their misdefinition to be used for that purpose, but the simple fact is that by equating the emotion-laden term "democracy" to the 'Great Cause' of Progressive education reforms all the seeds were planted for the subsequent antisocial propaganda campaigning this movement came to employ in attacking those who disagreed with its programs and ideas. Yet every one of the major reform movements of the 20th century sought to serve 'the Great Cause of Democracy' as the word 'democracy' was habitually understood. Cicero wrote the graduate-level textbook on propaganda:

A potent factor in success, then, is for the characters, principles, conduct and course of life, both of those who are to plead cases and of their clients, to be approved, and conversely those of their opponents to be condemned . . . Now feelings are won over by a man's merit, achievements, or reputable life, qualifications easier to embellish, if only they are real, than to fabricate where nonexistent. . . . It is very helpful to display the tokens of good-nature, kindness, calmness, loyalty and a disposition that is pleasing and not grasping or covetous; and all the qualities belonging to men who are upright, unassuming and not given to haste, stubbornness, strife or harshness are powerful in winning the goodwill, while the want of them estranges it from such as do not possess them; accordingly, the very opposites of these qualities must be ascribed to our opponents. [Cicero (55 BC), bk. II 182-3, pp. 327-329]

The Progressive Education movement had an anti-conservative character. Its conservative opponent was the Essentialism movement. While progressivism is sometimes said to be learner-centered, essentialism is sometimes said to be teacher-centered. It is a back-to-basics approach to public instructional education, as opposed to progressivism's psychological and experimentalist paradigm. The leading figures in the 20th century Essentialism movement were William Bagley (1874-1946), Harry Broudy (1905-1998), Max Rafferty (1917-1982), and Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr. (b. 1928). In contrast to progressivism, the essentialist reformers cannot accurately be said to have shared any one common philosophy as the basis of their alliance. The leaders of essentialism were professional educators and not philosophers, although Broudy held degrees in philosophy. Bagley held that knowledge was valuable in and of itself. Broudy held that there were universal truths that ought to be taught to pupils and universal structures found in humanity's struggles to achieve the good life. Rafferty was a so-called 'conservative' (that is, Republican Party) politician. Hirsch advocated a common-core, knowledge-rich curriculum and emphasized cultural literacy.

The Social Reconstructionism movement grew out of the Progressive Education movement. Its proponents were the more radical-leaning anti-conservatives of that movement. During the crisis of the Great Depression the movement became polarized and came to view education as a tool for fundamentally reconstructing Society. The movement tended to lean in favor of political socialism and so attracted many political extremists, anarchists, and mavericks. The Home School movement that emerged in the mid-1970s began as a Toynbee proletariat breaking with Social Reconstructionism and attracting others who had become disillusioned with the public schooling

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system and sought to withdraw their children from its influence for various reasons.

It is not accurate to characterize the Social Reconstructionism movement as being based on a philosophy, although various of its prominent figures were people given over to philosophizing. The person most often looked to as "the philosopher of Social Reconstructionism" is Brameld (1904-1987), but his doctrine falls rather short of being a philosophy and is more accurately regarded as an eclectic mix of influences that he attempted to synthesize into one theory.

Other notable figures in the Social Reconstructionist movement included Harold Rugg (1886-1960), George Counts (1889-1974), Paul Goodman (1911-1972), Ivan Illich (1926-2002), and John Holt (1923-1985). Rugg was an education theorist and had an early influence on progressivism. He was also a social theorist and one of the earliest advocates of using schools to effect changes in Society. His first series of books began being published before Brameld achieved any particular notoriety. Rugg's views drew charges from business mini-Communities, principally the Advertising Federation of America, and from the American Legion that labeled him as being pro-socialist. Marxist and Communist political movements in the United States were strong during the Great Depression, provoking sometimes-hysterical responses from reactionary political mini-Communities who labeled anyone critical of American Society as a socialist or a communist. Hysterical charges of this sort were even leveled at President Roosevelt.

George Counts was an educator and education theorist with a strong interest in sociology. He also became a prominent political activist, advocate for teachers' unions, and the founder of the New York State Liberal Party. He failed in a bid to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Although an early supporter and participant in the Progressive Education movement, he became a critic of this movement. He shocked and enraged conservatives in a 1931 PEA address by repeating Dewey's evangelical and antisocial call for teachers to "dare to build a new social order" in America.

Paul Goodman was one of many prominent non-educators who became activists in the Social Reconstructionist movement. He was a political activist associated with the political Left, a novelist, playwright, poet, and a lay psychotherapist who played a role in establishing Gestalt Therapy in the United States. He tended to anarchist views of education and was a notorious figure in the student movements of the 1960s civil war period. As the so-called New Left began to form as a movement, he became a critic of it as well and relationships between him and student reconstructionary radicals became hostile.

Ivan Illich was a defrocked reconstructionary priest and a social critic who seemed to display a persistent inability to get along with anyone for very long. He advocated for numerous ideas so offbeat that he acquired a reputation for being a crackpot. His chief role in the Social Re-constructionist movement is likely best described as "troublemaker." Finally, John Holt was an author, an educator who became disillusioned with and eventually an opponent of public schools, and a youth rights activist. Along with Illich and another education extremist, Harold Bennet, he became, through a series of books published from 1964 to 1979, one of the founders of the Home School movement. As I said earlier, the Social Reconstructionist movement cannot properly be called an education reform movement. It was a factious political movement of barely-allied egocentric individualists advocating radical reconstructionary changes in American Society.

From the perspective of the institution of public instructional education, the 20th century was probably the most turbulent and counterproductive era in American history. Faction-riddled, uncivically and uncivilly bellicose, politics-driven, and finally internecine, it fragmented the institution of public education into a hodgepodge of inconsistent contradictory fads and quack prescriptions that reflect the multiple-personality-disorder-like character of 20th century educational activism. What now remains for this volume to do is to critique this period in more particular detail. Volume III undertakes to begin a process aimed at building a social-natural institution of public instructional education on American social contract foundations.

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§ 7. References

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Blackburn, Simon (1996), The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Bode, Boyd H. (1927), Modern Educational Theories, NY: The Macmillan Co.

Brameld, Theodore (1950), Patterns of Educational Philosophy: A Democratic Interpretation, Yonkers-On-Hudson, NY: World Book Company.

Brameld, Theodore (1956), Toward a Reconstructed Philosophy of Education, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Brameld, Theodore (1971), Patterns of Educational Philosophy: Divergence and Convergence in Culturological Perspective, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

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Cicero (45 BC), De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, H. Rackham (tr.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 1931.

Dewey, John (1905), "Beliefs and Existences," in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays, pp. 169-197, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997.

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1827), The Science of Logic, in Hegel's Logic, William Wallace (tr.), Oxford, UK: The Oxford University Press, 1975.

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Mautner, Thomas (2000), Dictionary of Philosophy, London, Penguin Books.

Merrill, John C. and Ralph L. Lowenstein (1971), Media, Messages, and Men, NY: David McKay Company.

Mill, John Stuart (1859), On Liberty, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002.

Patrick, George Thomas White (1924), Introduction to Philosophy, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Potter, Robert E. (1967), The Stream of American Education, NY: American Book Co.

Pulliam, John D. & James J. van Patten (2007), History of Education in America, 9th ed., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Ravitch, Diane (2000), Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, NY: Simon & Schuster. In the third (Touchstone) printing, the title is altered to Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform. Otherwise the book is word-for-word the same.

Reese, William J. (2011), America's Public Schools, updated ed., Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Thelin, John R. (2004), A History of American Higher Education, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Toynbee, Arnold (1946), A Study of History, abridgment of volumes I-VI by D.C. Somervell, NY: Oxford University Press, 1947.

Veysey, Laurence R. (1965), The Emergence of the American University, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Webster (1962), Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged 2nd ed., Jean L. McKechnie (ed. in chief), Cleveland and NY: The World Publishing Co.

Wells, Richard B. (2009), The Principles of Mental Physics, available free of charge from the author's web site.

Wells, Richard B. (2011a), "Weaver's model of communications and its implications," June 2, available free of charge from the author's web site.

Wells, Richard B. (2011b), "On the derivation of an applied metaphysic," May 20, available free of charge from the author's web site.

Wells, Richard B. (2012a), The Idea of the Social Contract, available free of charge from the author's web site.

Wells, Richard B. (2012b), Education and Society, vol. I of The Idea of Public Education, available free of charge from the author's web site.

Zeller, Eduard (1931), Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, 13th ed., NY: Dover Publications, 1980.

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